Rocket Booster Falls From the Sky and Explodes Near Chinese Town

A rocket booster from a Chinese rocket that launched Friday, January 12 local time, fell back to Earth and exploded near a small town in the Guangxi province of southwest China, according to GBTimes. No injuries or casualties have been reported from the incident. A local video posted to the ChinaSpaceflight Twitter account caught the whole fiery scene.

The rocket booster was one of four strap-on boosters used on China's Long March 3B rocket to provide extra thrust. The boosters fall away from the rocket after they have spent most of their fuel, but clearly there was still enough to spark an explosion. The launch carried two navigation satellites to orbit before the rocket fell back to Earth.

Unlike launch complexes in the United States, which are primarily positioned on the coasts, China's Xichang Satellite Launch Center is located inland in the Sichuan province. As a result, American rockets fall into the ocean when they are spent, while Chinese rockets can fall on land, sometimes frightfully close to populated areas.

“There are notices released for the drop zones, depending on what kind of launch and where it’s going,” journalist Andrew Jones, who covers China’s spaceflight program, said to the Verge. “For some places, they’ll evacuate a town or an area, and they try to calculate these drop zones quite carefully to avoid as many inhabited areas as possible.”

Here's the end of the close-up video of the booster that fell from the Long March 3B today. There's bang then everyone runs away. Gets them away from the hydrazine for a while at least... pic.twitter.com/CbYKkDsvsO

Though the rocket booster doesn't appear to have hurt anyone or damaged any buildings on impact, it could still contain hydrazine rocket fuel, which is toxic if touched or inhaled.

This is not the first time that China's inland launch complex has caused an incident. In 1996, a Long March 3B veered off course immediately as it began to lift off and crashed into a the nearby town of Xichang. Hundreds of villagers could have died in that incident, though Chinese media only reported six casualties and 57 injuries, and possibly making it the worst launch disaster in history.

The recent incident was much less disastrous, though certainly dramatic as a rocket booster suddenly came falling out of the sky. China's new Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site is positioned on the island of Hainan in the South China Sea, where rockets can fly out over the water. However, the launch complex is designed to launch the newer Long March 5 and 7 rockets, and a Long March 5 recently suffered a complete failure after launching from the site. For the time being, it looks like China will need to continue launching over land to keep up its aggressive expansion in space capabilities.

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